“Take away their ham, and people shout, bang the table, and throw things,” says Richards, a supervisory agriculture specialist at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at the Seattle field office, covering people coming into the country from Washington's coast to the northeastern tip of Minnesota. “One Spanish lady put a hex on me that my stomach would rot out.”

He shrugs and pats his uniform’s shirtfront. “No ulcers so far.”

Every day, the CBP processes almost a million travelers into the country. And every day, officers discover contraband in their luggage, everything from conflict diamonds to drugs that cumulatively tip the scales at 11,945 pounds, along with, of course, food and drink.

A lot of food and drink.

According to a U.S. Customs database supplied to BonAppetit.com, the CBP discovers 440 pests and seizes 4,379 items per day on average, across air, sea, and land borders. Digging into the last three years of its data, we discovered that pork products get busted most often, followed by chicken-soup mix, beef, seeds of various kinds, dried citrus, and grapes (check out photos here). More exotic comestibles, including bird nests and camel meat, make strong showings as well. (We're looking at you, Vietnam, China, and…the Netherlands?!)

Sorry yellow dates, you're not coming in. Photo: Dylan + Jeni

From Paleo meat cookies to Chinese mitten crabs and unsterilized mangos sewn into socks, inspectors destroy anything that poses a threat to the environment or public health (no one wants to catch avian flu from duck tongues, after all). They also guard against hitchhiking pests like Asian longhorned beetles, which threaten ash and maple trees—the raw material of baseball bats and thus the American soul. And, finally, they confiscate anything made from endangered species, like remedies involving wild ginseng, bear gallstones, or $20,000 totoaba-fish bladders from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.

From one gaggle of travelers, CBP agriculture program manager Luca Furnare (also Seattle-based) seized a zoo’s worth of rare animal parts in a single homemade snake wine, a traditional Asian medicine. It contained ingredients from a tiger, lizard, snake, and a monkey, plus an entire crow. “One female in that group was pregnant and went crazy,” he recalls. “She thought her baby would die without it.”

Yup, that's a deer penis. Photo: Dylan + Jeni

Crossing Lines at the BorderPassions often run hot at customs. “I dealt with an older Chinese lady who had a trash bag of deer penises this high,” Richards says, touching his elbow. “She must have been 80 or 90 years old, but she ran around the counter, busted past one inspector, and then ran into another.”

(With grannies that spry, no wonder China’s Olympians took ancient performance boosters like this and turtle blood prior to the 2008 ban for top athletes there.)

When confronted, people often curse and attempt to compromise. (“Just let me eat the sandwich now. My mother made it, and I only get home once every five years.”) But nothing causes tantrums as consistently as pork, still the world’s most popular meat, which can wear many disguises in transit. Sausages in a puzzle box. Dirty underwear wrapped around Italian pancetta. Nearly 400 pounds of unrefrigerated Chimex-brand Mexican bologna behind the seat of a pickup.

Some brave the gantlet to smuggle in deeply nostalgic foods. Others hope to hang on to that last burst of flavor, suggests Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor, owner of Kookoolan Farms, a producer of heirloom pork in Yamhill, Oregon.

“The mainstream American production of lean meat has led to underfed, stressed animals here,” she says. "Meanwhile other countries have traditionally pasture-raised and artisan-finished red pork, and fermented sausages. No wonder many travelers want to keep the real thing."

New Yorker Elizabeth Lasa (not her real name) and her Spanish husband certainly do. They return from his homeland every year with chorizo and jamón vacuum-sealed in their checked luggage. Once she even wedged in an entire lomo (dry-cured pork tenderloin).

“So far we’ve been lucky!” she says. “I’m a bit brazen about it. I tell myself the worst that can happen is they will confiscate it, but there’s probably a fine too.”

She's right. Penalties for undeclared items start at $300 for Joe and Jane Public, and $500 for trusted travelers, who also risk their speed-demon status.

“I’ve seen people shrug off big fines, then cry over losing their NEXUS cards [for quicker transit between the U.S. and Canada]," Furnare says. "Because from there out, they’re gonna be stuck in normal border-crossing traffic (90 minutes versus 15, on average, in Washington state).”

Seattleite Christian Silk almost didn’t get his NEXUS pass because he’d absentmindedly packed some kielbasa for his toddler while saying goodbye to family in Ukraine.

“Traveling with an 18-month-old child is distracting. I’d forgotten we even had it tucked into some random bag," he says. "The sausage was cut up and in a little kid’s container. Obviously we just forgot to dump it. The actual getting-busted part, they were nice about. But during our trusted-traveler interview, I joked, ‘Really, that’s on our permanent record?’ And the woman got all stern: ‘Yes, and it’s pretty serious.’”

The Perils of PorkOfficers understand the siren call of bringing home the bacon, even as they have to confiscate it, Richards says: “Travelers think, ‘I’ve been eating it for weeks, what’s the problem?’ But if they throw away a wrapper, it can cause an outbreak.”

Raw garbage off a Navy ship returning from Kobe, Japan, did exactly that in California 90 years ago, infecting hogs that chowed down on it with foot-and-mouth disease. The virus spread to cows, sheep, goats, and deer. Ranchers had to round up livestock—even exposed but healthy animals—and slaughter them, burying 131,973 carcasses in pits of lime.

The U.S. purged the disease in 1929, but stays vigilant against it, as well as new threats like the highly contagious African swine fever, says Bobby Acord, a consultant for the National Pork Producers Council: “There’s no cure, no vaccine. If it reaches our shores, it would have a devastating effect in lost profits and the cost of attempts to control the outbreak, a burden that falls heavily on taxpayers.”

Americans often don’t realize the stakes, he says, because our hog herds rank among the world’s healthiest, allowing us to eat things like uncured sausage. But that same product, imported as a souvenir, could carry a virus capable of gutting a $97 billion industry.

“You have to measure the interception of one person’s snack against the health of U.S. agriculture. It’s just not a risk worth taking," Acord says. "Only one percent of people may farm here, but 100 percent of us need to eat. We don’t want any glitches there.”

How to Get Food Souvenirs Home Safely

Labels Are Your Friends: Local markets may open up worlds of authentic flavor, but U.S. Customs inspectors love to see properly labeled items, especially for ambiguous foods (asses’ glue—a donkey gelatin—looks just like chocolate, for example).

Proper Papers, Please! Mind the red tape: The right documentation can send that Parma ham homeward bound, while the wrong certificates could get your bumper crop of live giant snails destroyed. Go here for more info.

Duty Free Doesn't Mean Scot-Free: “Buying duty free is no guarantee,” Richards says. “Sometimes the salesperson is running a game on passengers. Other times they just don’t know where you’re headed.”

Don't Be a Tin-Foil Conspiracist: Richards also recommends putting all food into one bag, and not taping wrappers. “If we can’t see into an unlabeled package, we will have to cut into it. Also, we can tell when you conceal items in aluminum foil. Maybe that worked with old X-ray machines, but not anymore.”

Pay Attention to the Customs Definition of 'Food': Art objects—like Poland's decorated eggs—may seem like innocent celebrations of craftsmanship. But U.S. Customs sees only raw shells—prohibited even when empty and hand-painted. Avoid the heartbreak of losing a treasured memento by keeping up to date on what you're allowed to bring in—before you purchase.

Making the target even harder to hit, the rules change from country to country. So consult www.cbp.gov before you go—and check with officers on your return.

“You’re coming home because you love your home,” Furnare says. “Put some thought into protecting it.”